UC Riverside

Energy is central to achieving the goals of sustainable development and will continue to be a primary engine for economic development. In fact, access to and consumption of energy is highly effective on the quality of life. The consumption of all energy sources have been increasing and the projections show that this will continue in the future. Unfortunately, conventional energy sources are limited and they are about to run out. Solar energy is one of the major alternative energy sources to meet the increasing demand. Photovoltaic devices are one way to harvest energy from sun and as a branch of photovoltaic devices organic bulk heterojunction photovoltaic devices have recently drawn tremendous attention because of their technological advantages for actualization of large-area and cost effective fabrication. The research in this dissertation focuses on both the mathematical modelling for better and more efficient characterization and the improvement of device power conversion efficiency. In the first part, we studied the effect of incident light power on the space charge regions of the Schottky barriers of the organic bulk heterojunction photovoltaic devices, the current-voltage characteristics and performance of the devices and built a current-voltage model for the devices that involves these effects. The incident light power showed an effect on the Schottky barriers of the devices by changing the width of the space charge regions. This change directly affects the reverse bias current-voltage curves by increasing the current values and the slope of the curves. But under excessive incident light power; the space charge regions merge, the devices break down and work as ohmic devices. In the second part, we combined the two improvement methods, improving the charge carrier transport and improving absorption of the organic bulk heterojunction photovoltaic devices. For charge carrier transport improvement, we presented deoxyribonucleic acid complexes as hole collecting and electron blocking layer on the anode side of the devices by using them as band energy diagram arranging layer, for absorption improvement with plasmonic effect of the particles, we present colloidal platinum nanoparticles as the surface plasmons. Deoxyribonucleic acid complex layer improved the device performance by improving the charge carrier hopping efficiency of the devices by arranging the band energy diagram in order to collect holes easily and block electrons diffusing to anode electrodes. Colloidal platinum nanoparticles layer improved the device performance by increasing the light-harvesting efficiency of the devices by increasing the rate of photon absorption. This proves that the colloidal platinum nanoparticles can be used as surface plasmons in organic bulk heterojunction photovoltaic devices. Because peak their extinction spectra matches with the peak of absorbance of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT): [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM). Combination of these two novel materials in the same device showed a significant improvement as a 26% increase in the power conversion efficiency of the devices. The research conducted in this dissertation offers promising potential of organic bulk heterojunction photovoltaic devices as one of the clean and affordable alternative energy sources for supplying increasing demand on energy.